Æsthetic value also has not been recognized, and for the opposite
reason. The sense of beauty would appear to be a correlate of relatively
perfect attained adjustment between the agent and his natural
environment or the conditions suggested more or less impressively by the
work of art. There must, indeed, be present in the æsthetic experience
an element of unsatisfied curiosity sufficient to stimulate an interest
in the changing or diverse aspects of the beautiful object, but this
must not be sufficient to prompt reflective judgment of the details
presented. On the whole, the æsthetic experience would appear to be
essentially post-judgmental and appreciative. It comes on the particular
occasion, not as the result of a judgment-process of the valuational
type, but as an immediate appreciation. As an immediate appreciation it
has no logical function and on our principles must be denied the name of
value. Our standpoint must be that of the experiencing individual. The
æsthetic experience as a type may well be a development out of the
artistic and so find its ultimate explanation in the psychology of
man's primitive technological occupations in the ordinary course of
life. It is, as we have said, of the post-judgmental type, and so may
very probably be but the cumulative outcome of closer and closer
approximations along certain lines to a perfected adjustment with the
conditions of life. It may thus have its origin in past processes of the
reflective valuational type. Nevertheless, viewed in the light of its
actual present character and status in experience, the æsthetic must be
excluded from the sphere of values.
Thus the realms of fact and value are both real, but that of value is
logically prior and so the "more real." The realm of fact is that of
conditions warranting the purposes of the self; as a separate order,
complete and absolute in itself, it is an abstraction that has forgotten
the reason for which it was made. Reality in the logical sense is that
which furthers the development of the self. The purpose that falls short
of its promise in this regard is unreal--not, indeed, in the
psychological sense that it never existed in imagination, but in the
logical sense that it is no longer valued. Within the inclusive realm of
reality the realm of fact is that of the means which serve the concrete
purposes which the self accepts. The completed purpose, however, is not
_means_, since still behind and beyond it there can be no other concrete
valued purpose which it can serve. Nor is it an ultimate _end_, since in
its character of accepted and valued end the self adheres _to_ it, and
it therefore cannot express the _whole_ purpose of the self to whose
unspecifiable fulness and increase of activity it is but a temporary
probational contributor. It is rather in the nature of a formula or
method of behavior to which the self ascribes reality by recognizing and
accepting it as its own.
XI
SOME LOGICAL ASPECTS OF PURPOSE
INTRODUCTORY
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